Curiosity, the tireless Martian laborer, is unique in many ways. The rover weighs 900 kilograms, it is even larger than the Soviet "Lunokhod".
The thing is that it has a lot of instruments on board: the mass of scientific equipment is ten times that of the Opportunity rover. For example, he has a manipulator arm about two meters long and a powerful geological analyzer for the samples taken.
This is the first rover capable of descending into depressions and climbing slopes, which is important for studying the geology of Mars (the most ordinary cliff reveals millions of years of geological history). Again, for the first time, not solar panels were used to power the rover, but a source of heat and electricity based on the energy of radioactive decay. And, finally, Curiosity has panoramic cameras capable of shooting up to 10 frames per second.
Over the five-year history of its Martian odyssey (the device landed on the Red Planet on August 5, 2012) Curiosity has delighted us with interesting news more than once. For example, in 2014, he captured a mysterious bright glow on Mars. And this time the object of his attention was the clouds, unusual for this time of year.
In the early Martian morning, the "white-winged horses" posed in front of the rover's navigation camera: first, it was directed to the zenith, and then surveyed the southern horizon. Two sets of eight images each made it possible to see the moving clouds, albeit not very clearly.
To sharpen the image, Charissa Campbell of York University in Toronto superimposed all of the images in each of the two series, creating a “middle image,” and then subtracted it as the background from each individual image. This processing emphasized the differences between the images from each other and highlighted the running clouds. Already at noon, the sky above the vehicle was absolutely cloudless.
On a warm and humid Earth, clouds are common. They are also found in other parts of the Universe: on Venus, Jupiter, as well as exoplanets.
But on far from the Sun, cold and dry Mars, the sky is almost always immaculately clear.
Promotional video:
Usually, the cloud belt occurs near the equator of the planet (the Curiosity apparatus is located five degrees south of the equator), when it is farthest from the Sun. But the current “heavenly wanderers” appeared quite early - two months before the arrival of the Red Planet at this point of the orbit.
Scientists suggest that these clouds are composed of ice crystals, like their counterparts in high enough layers of the earth's atmosphere. By the way, nine years ago, the Phoenix Mars Lander observed clouds in the Arctic regions of the Red Planet.
Anatoly Glyantsev